A number of existing techniques allow end-users to access World Wide Web (WWW) information services using a television set instead of a computer monitor. These techniques further allow WWW content providers to modify information service content (e.g., Web page content) so that it can be broadcast by a head-end to viewers. These conventional techniques are beneficial because they bridge a gap between WWW information services and broadcast interactive television (ITV) content in a manner that is user scalable. However, these conventional techniques are also limited for a number of reasons.
For instance, existing techniques to broadcast originally Web-based content typically require WWW content providers to engage in substantial efforts to convert the Web content into a data format that is compatible with one or more particular cable broadcast servers, clients, and/or transport implementations. This means that the WWW content providers must not only design Web content for proper display within constraints of various implementations of television appliances, but must also utilize various tools and pre-existing knowledge to generate content that may be compatible with a particular head-end's specific server and/or transport implementations so that a respective head-end can broadcast the content to viewers. Such design and transformation activities are generally labor intensive and time consuming. Note, these design and transformation activities must be performed by the WWW content provider prior to transferring any information (i.e., Web content that has been converted by WWW content providers into a different data format for broadcast to subscribers) to a head-end.
To make matters worse, today's consumers generally demand rapid access to content, regardless of whether the content was originally deployed by a Web-server or on some other server (e.g., a Video-On-Demand (VOD) server). Yet conventional techniques to broadcast transformed Web data are not streamlined for rapid deployment to such information eager consumers. This is because these conventional techniques require transmission of substantially large amounts of data to the consumer. This means that such conventional techniques are generally very bandwidth intensive. Bandwidth is a commodity. The ability to rapidly deliver broadcast content to consumers is at least partially a function of communication pathway data throughput speeds, which are generally reduced by transmission of large amounts of data.
The following systems and methods address these and other limitations of conventional arrangements and techniques to create and deliver content to networked clients.